While America’s eyes are focused on the battle to defeat ISIS and cease the relentless series of global terrorist attacks, at colleges across the United States, a coalition of terrorist-linked organizations are waging a propaganda war to destroy the Jewish state, annihilate the Jewish people and fan the flames of hatred for America as Israel’s “protector.” Led by Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Association, and Jewish Voice for Peace, these organizations do not launch rockets at Israeli civilian targets or dig terror tunnels under Israeli kindergarten classrooms. But they spread propaganda and take money and marching orders from those who do. Their mission is to whitewash actual terrorist attacks and promote the genocidal lies of terrorist organizations, specifically Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of the Jewish state.
In conducting these malevolent campaigns, these campus allies of the terrorists can count on the funding and protection of American universities like the University of California, who allow them to use their authority and prestige to lend this genocidal offensive an aura of respectability. The hatred that is an inevitable aspect of these campaigns has inspired an epidemic of anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish students, 59% of which – according to one study – are attributable to the anti-Israel lies spread by these campus groups, namely that Israel is built on stolen Arab land and is an “apartheid state.”[1]
The primary collegiate member of the Hamas terror network is Students for Justice in Palestine whose principal founder is Hamas supporter Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian professor at UC-Berkeley. Bazian co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine in 2001 to support the Second Palestinian Intifada, which introduced suicide bombing into the attacks on Israel’s citizens in September 2000.
In his book American Jihad, terrorism expert Steven Emerson quotes Bazian’s exhortations at an American Muslim Alliance conference at which Bazian endorsed the infamous Hadith calling for the slaughter of the Jews, and advocated for the establishment of an Islamic state in Palestine: “In the Hadith, the Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews. They are on the west side of the river, which is the Jordan River, and you’re on the east side until the trees and stones will say, ‘Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!’ And that’s in the Hadith about this, this is a future battle before the Day of Judgment.”
Every successful terrorist campaign has a political as well as a military arm. The IRA terrorist organization was aided and abetted by its sister organization, Sinn Fein, a parliamentary party which advanced the terrorists’ agendas through propaganda and political support. Hamas operates in a similar fashion, relying on Students for Justice in Palestine and its key campus allies – the Muslim Students Association and Jewish Voice for Peace – to advance its sinister agendas. It does so with Hamas’s organizational support and funding through an intermediary organization, American Muslims for Palestine, whose creator is also Hatem Bazian. Hatem Bazian currently serves as the chair of AMP’s board. In 2009, Bazian founded the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project at the University of California’s Center for Race and Gender. Thus, the University of California also lends its prestige and resources to a program designed by a terrorist agent to discredit critics of Islamic terrorism as “Islamophobes.”
Other key board member officers of American Muslims for Palestine were formerly board members of the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Muslim charity in America until it was exposed in trial as a front for Hamas. American Muslims for Palestine has copied the Holy Land Foundation model. In recent testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jonathan Schanzer, who worked as a terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury from 2004-2007, and now serves as the Vice President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), described how Hamas funnels large sums of money and provides material assistance to Students for Justice in Palestine through AMP for the purpose of promoting BDS campaigns and disseminating Hamas propaganda on American campuses.
According to his testimony, “At its 2014 annual conference, AMP invited participants to ‘come and navigate the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.’” He further classified AMP as “arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is the most visible arm of the BDS campaign on campuses in the United States.” He revealed that AMP “provides speakers, training, printed materials, a so-called ‘Apartheid Wall,’ and grants to SJP activists” and “even has a campus coordinator on staff whose job is to work directly with SJP and other pro-BDS campus groups across the country.” Furthermore, “according to an email it sent to subscribers, AMP spent $100,000 on campus activities in 2014 alone.”
Since its founding in 2001, Students for Justice in Palestine has served as a front for Hamas on university campuses. Students for Justice in Palestine is the leading force behind the Hamas-endorsed and funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, a form of economic terrorism which seeks to weaken the Jewish state, deny it legitimacy, and ultimately destroy it. As of May 2017, over 50 campuses had passed resolutions endorsing the BDS movement against Israel and over 100 campuses had debated the issue. Students for Justice in Palestine’s chief allies in these BDS campaigns are the Muslim Students Association and Jewish Voice for Peace.
Students for Justice in Palestine and its partners are also responsible for the proliferation of Hamas propaganda attacks known as “Israeli Apartheid Weeks” which occur on dozens of prominent university campuses every year. These weeks provide opportunities to bring in Hamas-supporting campus speakers and to erect mock “apartheid walls” featuring Hamas propaganda claims that Israel targets Palestinian children for slaughter, and fake maps that purport to show that Israel stole Palestinian land. While SJP falsely accuses Israel of theft and war crimes, it also works to whitewash the atrocities committed by Hamas, whether the deliberate use of civilians as human shields in military combat or the abduction and slaughter of three Israeli teenagers that started the 2014 Gaza War. And it works to glamorize terrorists such as Rasmeah Odeh who was convicted by an Israeli military court in 1970 for her involvement in two fatal terrorist bombings. Another terrorist lionized by SJP is Leila Khaled, a convicted hijacker and a member of the terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
SJP and its partners conduct their campaign of aggression against the Jewish state through the relentless dissemination of genocidal lies intended to warp student opinion on Israel. Prominent among these lies is the claim that Israel occupies Arab land. In fact, the land on which Israel was created by the U.N. was part of the Ottoman Empire that belonged to the Turks for 400 years previously. The Turks are not “Palestinians,” and are not even Arabs. A second lie designed to de-legitimize the Jewish state and justify its destruction, is the claim that Israel is an “apartheid state.” The Arab citizens of Israel have more rights, and enjoy more freedom, education, and economic opportunity than the Arabs of any Arab state. Arab citizens of Israel vote in national elections, have representatives in the Israeli Parliament, sit on the Israeli Supreme Court, and serve as tenured professors teaching in Israeli colleges and universities.
Perhaps the most destructive lie is the one that motivates all the campaigns of SJP and its partners — the claim that the terrorist aggressions by Arabs against Israel which began in 1949 as unprovoked attacks on the newly created Jewish state are efforts to liberate “Palestine.” Palestinians are a “nationality” that didn’t even exist until 1964 – sixteen years after Israel’s creation. Jordan is a majority Palestinian country ruled by a Hashemite minority, but it is not a target of this alleged liberation campaign. The campaign in fact has only one clear agenda: the destruction of the Jewish state.
The campaigns inspired and funded by Hamas terrorists and carried out by Students for Justice in Palestine, the Muslim Students Association and Jewish Voice for Peace have had the demonstrable effect of spreading hate against Jewish students on American campuses. A recent study conducted by Trinity College and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights found that 54% of students surveyed experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism during the previous six months on campus. Another study conducted by the Amcha Initiative revealed a very strong correlation between these so-called “anti-Zionist” groups and incidents of anti-Semitism and harassment of Jewish students. The study found that “99% of schools with one or more active anti-Zionist groups had one or more incidents of anti-Semitic activity, whereas only 16% of schools with no active anti-Zionist student group had incidents of overall anti-Semitic activity.” As these studies make clear, Hamas’s campus front has spawned an epidemic of anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish students that continues to grow worse.
This campaign seeks to expose the campus terrorist campaign to delegitimize and destroy the Jewish state at American universities. We are releasing a report describing these campaigns on ten characteristic campuses, which we have singled out as the worst, but the fact remains that hundreds of campuses across our nation now support terrorist-inspired campaigns whose goals are genocidal and whose weapon is hate.
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